However, you will find people in Northern Ireland who say they’re Irish as around 40% of the population is Irish. The rest are mainly made up of the descendants of the lowland Scots who returned to Ireland in the 1600s and they will say they’re British.
OK, so 60% of the population would say they’re British and the other 40% would say they’re Irish then? By and large that’s true these days but interestingly my granny and people of her generation (essentially those born prior to the 1930s) would have said that she was Irish. The difference is that she would have been saying it in the same sense that someone from Edinburgh would say they’re Scottish ie with the understanding that she was saying that whilst she was British, she happened to have been born in Ireland.

Now you might think that as the 1600s are quite a long time ago that there’d have been considerable intermarriage between the two sets of occupants and in most parts of the world where similar settlement took place that’s indeed what happened. However, in the case of Northern Ireland the returning Scots were almost entirely Protestant whilst those that were there already were almost entirely Catholic. Combine large independent settlements with religious rules making it difficult for intermarriage to occur and what happened in practice was that there was very little intermarriage so that even over 300 years later most people have ancestors that were exclusively from one side or the other.

Interestingly the emigrants going to America went in much the same proportion as the nationalities that now exist in Northern Ireland. Consequently, something of the order of 60% of those that would consider themselves “Irish Americans” are really “Ulster Scots Americans”. How can you tell which you are? Thanks to the lack of intermarriage it’s generally quite easy to do: if your ancestors came from Ireland but you have a Scottish surname then it’s almost certain that you are Ulster Scots descent since the Scots were generally concentrated in the province of Ulster.

Well, tha’s a guid question an yin we’ll be lookin at. Ye see the problem is tha befor a coupla years back there wasne any Ulster Scots writin at all. I learn’d it at me granny’s knee but didnae larn tae spell it so ah hope y’all excuse my goes at spellin it

But it’ll not all be in Ulster Scots because for one thing there’s only around 100,000 of us that could claim to speak it even a little. Yet, there are millions who could claim to BE Ulster Scots or at least of Ulster Scots descent. Most of those are, of course, Americans who think they are Irish American yet are actually Ulster Scots American.

On the spelling front, since my granny spoke it to me but didn’t teach me to spell it (after all, it wasn’t a written language until very recently) my words won’t always be spelled in the same way as another Ulster Scots speaker would. That’s because Ulster Scots is very much at the stage of codification cum standardisation which basically means that I can make it up as I go along. In practice I suspect I’ll also need to extend the language a little too so, for example, I’m currently counting “blog” as an Ulster Scots word.